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Works byA. J. Liebling(Journalist, Writer)
[1904 - 1963]

Profile created February 10, 2007

Back Where I Came From (1938)
Back Where I Came From was Liebling's first book, and in it one sees
initial glimmers of the kinds of colorful characters he would, over the
course of his decades at the New Yorker, introduce to his ever-growing
audience. This rollicking tour of the more amusing sideshows to be found
in the master journalist's native city features memorable figures, such
as the Mayor of Mulberry Street, whose responsibilities include keeping
tabs on people's trips to Coney Island, because an uneven number of dips
in the sea would be certain to cause rheumatism; a professional faster
who weighs 260 pounds and a professional eater who weighs 180; and a
tugboat captain who sounds just like a real-life Popeye ("I am
seventy-four years old and I can jump out of that window and jump back
again.")

With wry wit and knowing affection, one of the finest, and funniest,
journalists of all time brings to life the city he loves-its
speakeasies, gyms, markets, and waterfront. Back Where I Came From is
vintage Liebling, sure to enchant Gotham's fans and foes alike.

Often referred to as “Liebling lowlife pieces,” the essays in The
Telephone Booth Indian boisterously celebrate raffishness. A. J.
Liebling appreciated a good scam and knew how to cultivate the scammers.
Telephone Booth Indians (entrepreneurs so impecunious that they conduct
business from telephone booths in the lobbies of New York City office
buildings) and a host of other petty nomads of Broadway—with names like
Marty the Clutch and Count de Pennies—are the protagonists in this
incomparable Liebling work. In The Telephone Booth Indian,
Liebling proves just why he was the go-to man on New York lowlife and
con culture; this is the master at the top of his form, uncovering scam
after scam and writing about them with the wit and charisma that
established him as one of the greatest journalists of his generation and
one of New York’s finest cultural chroniclers.

Originally published in 1944, The Road Back to Paris comprises
dispatches from France, England, and North Africa that A. J. Liebling
filed with The New Yorker during the Second World War. The magazine sent
Liebling to Paris in 1939, hoping that he could replicate in wartime
France his brilliant reporting of New York life. Liebling succeeded
triumphantly, concentrating on writing the individual soldier's story to
illuminate the larger picture of the European theater of the war and the
fight for what Liebling felt was the first priority of business: the
liberation of his beloved France.

The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural
life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by
the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by
Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their
next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a
staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable
hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the
Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the
series, restoring as its emblem the running torch-bearer created by
Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as
well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern
Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

For a complete list of titles, see the inside of the jacket. Despite his
ill health and bad eyesight, Liebling went on patrol, interviewed
soldiers, fled Paris and returned after D-Day, was shot at in North
Africa and bombed in the blitz in London. Into this chaos, as his
biographer Raymond Sokolov comments, "he brought himself, a fiercely
committed Francophile with a novelist's skill for crystallizing his
day-to-day experiences into a profound chronicle of a 'world knocked
down.' "

Many Chicagoans rose in protest over A. J. Liebling’s tongue-in-cheek
tour of their fair city in 1952. Liebling found much to admire in the
Windy City’s people and culture—its colorful language, its political
sophistication, its sense of its own history and specialness, but
Liebling offended that city’s image of itself when he discussed its
entertainments, its built landscapes, and its mental isolation from the
world’s affairs.

Liebling, a writer and editor for the New Yorker, lived in Chicago for
nearly a year. While he found a home among its colorful inhabitants, he
couldn’t help comparing Chicago with some other cities he had seen and
loved, notably Paris, London, and especially New York. His magazine
columns brought down on him a storm of protests and denials from
Chicago’s defenders, and he gently and humorously answers their charges
and acknowledges his errors in a foreword written especially for the
book edition. Liebling describes the restaurants, saloons, and
striptease joints; the newspapers, cocktail parties, and political
wards; the university; and the defining event in Chicago’s mythic past,
the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Illustrated by Steinberg, Chicago is
a loving, if chiding, portrait of a great American metropolis.

In 1947 A.J. Liebling had the great good fortune to make the
acquaintance of the Honest Rainmaker, Colonel John R. Stingo. Stingo-the
salt, pepper, and ketchup of the earth-was as much a journalist as he
was a personality who graced the pages of newspapers for over sixty
years. After the fortuitous meeting, Mr. Liebling set out to record the
redoubtable individual's colorful memoirs, and the end result is a rare
delight.

A.J. Liebling's classic New Yorker pieces on the "sweet science
of bruising" bring vividly to life the boxing world as it once was. It
depicts the great events of boxing's American heyday: Sugar Ray
Robinson's dramatic comeback, Rocky Marciano's rise to prominence, Joe
Louis's unfortunate decline. Liebling never fails to find the human
story behind the fight, and he evokes the atmosphere in the arena as
distinctly as he does the goings-on in the ring--a combination that
prompted Sports Illustrated to name The Sweet Science the
best American sports book of all time.

In the summer of 1959, A. J. Liebling, veteran writer for the New
Yorker, came to Louisiana to cover a series of bizarre events which
began when Governor Earl K. Long was committed to a mental institution.
Captivated by his subject, Liebling remained to write the fascinating
yet tragic story of ?Uncle Earl?s? final year in politics. First
published in 1961, The Earl of Louisiana recreates a stormy era
of Louisiana politics and captures the style and personality of one of
the most colorful and paradoxical figures in the state?s history.

A. J. Liebling’s coverage of the Second World War for the New Yorker
gives us a fresh and unexpected view of the war—stories told in the
words of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who fought it, the civilians
who endured it, and the correspondents who covered it.
The hero of the title story is a private in the Ninth Army division
known as Mollie, short for Molotov, so called by his fellow G.I.s
because of his radical views and Russian origins. Mollie was famous for
his outlandish dress (long blonde hair, riding boots, feathered beret,
field glasses, and red cape), his disregard for army discipline, his
knack for acquiring prized souvenirs, his tales of being a Broadway big
shot, and his absolute fearlessness in battle. Killed in combat on Good
Friday, 1943, Mollie (real name: Karl Warner) was awarded the Silver
Star posthumously. Intrigued by the legend and fascinated by the man
behind it, Liebling searched out Mollie’s old New York haunts and
associates and found behind the layers of myth a cocky former busboy
from Hell’s Kitchen who loved the good life.
Other stories take Liebling through air battles in Tunisia, across the
channel with the D-Day invasion fleet, and through a liberated Paris
celebrating de Gaulle and freedom. Liebling’s war was a vast
human-interest story, told with a heart for the feelings of the people
involved and the deepest respect for those who played their parts with
heroism, however small or ordinary the stage.

A collection of New Yorker columnist A. J. Liebling's four
essays on the controversy surrounding Pyramid Lake in the 1950s. Nevada
scholar Elmer Rusco provides important historic background information
on the Paiutes and "the Lake of the Cui-ui Eaters."

)
The restaurants of the Latin Quarter and the city rooms of midtown
Manhattan; the beachhead of Normandy and the boxing gyms of Times
Square; the trackside haunts of bookmakers and the shadowy redoubts of
Southern politicians--these are the places that A.J. Liebling shows to
us in his unforgettable New Yorker articles, brought together
here so that a new generation of readers might discover Liebling as if
for the first time.

Born a hundred years ago, Abbott Joseph "Joe" Liebling was the first of
the great New Yorker writers, a colorful and tireless figure who
helped set the magazine's urbane style. Today, he is best known as a
celebrant of the "sweet science" of boxing or as a "feeder" who ravishes
the reader with his descriptions of food and wine. But as David Remnick,
a Liebling devotee, suggests in his fond and insightful introduction,
Liebling was a writer bounded only by his intelligence, taste, and ardor
for life. Like his nemesis William Randolph Hearst, he changed the rules
of modern journalism, banishing the distinctions between reporting and
storytelling, between news and art. Whatever his role, Liebling is a
most companionable figure, and to read the pieces in this grand and
generous book is to be swept along on a thrilling adventure in a world
of confidence men, rogues, press barons and political cronies, with an
inimitable writer as one's guide.

Demonstrating A.J. Liebling’s abiding passion for the “sweet
science” of boxing, A Neutral Corner brings together fifteen
previously unpublished pieces written between 1952 and 1963. Antic,
clear-eyed, and wildly entertaining, these essays showcase a The
New Yorker journalist at the top of his form. Here one relives
the high drama of the classic Patterson-Johansson championship bout
of 1959, and Liebling’s early prescient portrayal of Cassius Clay’s
style as a boxer and a poet is not to be missed.

Liebling always finds the human story that makes these essays
appealing to aficionados of boxing and prose alike. Alive with a
true fan’s reverence for the sport, yet balanced by a true skeptic’s
disdain for sentiment, A Neutral Corner is an American
treasure.